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Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023) As the common lament of late would have it, there isn’t enough sex in the movies. Enter Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which directly positions itself against this cultural puritanism, unleashing an onslaught of unwholesome acts, all presented as unambiguously empowering for its heroine, a yassified Frankenstein’s monster named Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). Lanthimos has done it again, flaunting a foul-mouthed, sexually deviant dame who would not seem out of place in the world of The Favourite (2018), the director’s previous period piece....

Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado, 2023) The relationship of cinema to first-person expression is an uneasy one. In literature, sole authorship is the rule; in film, the inverse holds true. Despite the auteurist celebration of individuality—and the rich tradition of single-person filmmaking that does exist in the avant-garde—it typically takes a village to make a movie. Nevertheless, contemporary nonfiction is marked by a strong tendency to tell one’s “own” story....

In the early spring of 1964, Clint Eastwood, a TV actor looking to break into movies, signed a contract to spend his sixth-season hiatus from his sidekick role on the CBS series Rawhide in Italy and Spain, making a Western called Magnificent Stranger for a novice director, Sergio Leone. Leone knew of Eastwood only because he had happened to see the 91st episode of Rawhide, “Incident of the Black Sheep,” and was happy to get him at the bargain-basement price of $15,000—which was $10,000 less than Charles Bronson had demanded....

Detroit is angry, lucid, bludgeoning, subtle, and at times surprisingly moving. In their bravest collaboration so far, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) focus on the 12th Street Riot of 1967 that tore the Motor City apart along racial lines. They zero in on the atrocity that became known as the Algiers Motel Incident, in which a trio of white city policemen terrorized the patrons of the motel’s annex, a manor house set off from the main building....

Outlaw King makes sense mostly as a tale of two papa’s boys pitted against each other by blood and conquest, circa 1304. One is a healthy, loving lad: our rugged, bearded Scottish hero, Robert Bruce (Chris Pine), Earl of Carrick. He basks in the affection of his father, also Robert Bruce (James Cosmo), even if it leads him astray, as when he follows Da’s advice to accept King Edward of England as his overlord....

When he was winning praise for roles like the drug-addicted inner-city middle-school teacher in Half Nelson (06), Ryan Gosling told me in an interview that his favorite movie at age 13 was East of Eden. So I asked him if that meant he was a James Dean fan. He said: “As I get older, I’m just as much a Gene Wilder fan, or Buster Keaton or Bill Murray or Klaus Kinski or Abbott and Costello....

Images from Weathering with You (Makoto Shinkai, 2020) Makoto Shinkai’s sixth feature-length cartoon, Weathering with You, oozes visual lyricism and primal yearning. Shinkai’s characters may be “wispy” (negative spin) or “archetypal” (positive spin), his messages may be “sentimental” or (unduly) “optimistic,” but he’s a born moviemaker with an imagistic imagination. As Shinkai follows a runaway 16-year-old, Hodaka, who ships out from his island home and carves a place for himself in Tokyo during an unprecedented rain-soaked summer, the movie’s surface oscillates between harsh or seductive liquid shapes and slashes or pools of colorful, shimmering light....

Palermo oder Wolfsburg Like his contemporaries Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, the late Werner Schroeter was one of the New German Cinema’s seminal figures, if far more marginal in terms of recognition. He started out as an underground filmmaker in 1967 before making a critical impact on the international festival circuit and winning a devoted cult following. His films, shot through with a predilection for operatic excess and artifice, defy categorization, and are infuriatingly obscure for some and entrancingly poetic for others....

Among the Living Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, the directors of Among the Living, are to splatter what Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are to giallo. Their latest film is a perverse pastiche of Seventies exploitation and Eighties kids adventures: three boys stumble upon an abandoned film set where a gas mask-wearing father sics his hairless, hulking, paler-than-pale freak-child on them. With their latest, as with Inside (07) and Livid (11), writer-directors Maury and Bustillo embrace artifice, stripping horror of any semblance of character depth or logic....

Images from Burning Cane (Phillip Youmans, 2019) Burning Cane is the first feature by Phillip Youmans, a writer-director from New Orleans, now aged 19 and studying film at NYU. He completed the film when he was still in high school. That isn’t by any means the most interesting thing to be said about his movie, but neither is Youmans’s precocity something to be overlooked. It’s not just his talent as a filmmaker that’s striking, but also the sense you get that, to have made such a film in his teens, Youmans must have observed life and human behavior in a way that suggests a depth and philosophical maturity rare among filmmakers of any age....

There are a number of peculiar things about new Chinese film I Am Not Madame Bovary: not the least of them is the title. Flaubert’s 1856 novel Madame Bovary is about a woman in France who, bored with her marriage to a stolid doctor, embarks on three affairs, her head filled with misguided ideas of romance; the character of Emma Bovary, and the syndrome derived from her name, bovarysme, connote not just sexual appetite but a helpless, deluded inability to deal with life’s mundane realities....

Luchino Visconti’s historical drama Ludwig is the sort of film that tends to be called a folly, but here the epithet isn’t altogether inappropriate. The film is certainly about folly—about an obsession which could be considered madness or be seen as a doomed idealism, striving for the absolute but fatally out of step with the realities of its age. The subject of this 1972 film—which can now be seen in a complete, 232-minute 35mm print as part of a Visconti retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center—is Ludwig II, King of Bavaria from 1864 to 1886, and sometimes known as the “Mad King” or the “Swan King,” given his predilection for the iconography of Wagner’s operas....

What does it take to make a film maudit? Bong Joon Ho’s futuristic train story Snowpiercer pulls into U.S. theatrical stations this week preceded by several months of speculation on the likelihood that Western audiences would never see Bong’s original cut; the director was for a long time involved in disputes over The Weinstein Company’s proposal to cut the film, and to add opening and closing voiceovers. The film arrives in its original 125-minute cut which gives it a certain skin-of-its-teeth prestige, but also makes it that bit harder not to judge Snowpiercer as a freak “case” rather than a legitimate movie....

In the German film Victoria, a vast swathe of human experience has been squeezed into 134 minutes of narrative—dance-floor euphoria, flirtation, danger, a rooftop reverie, an impromptu piano recital, desperation, romance, the lot. And all in a single seamless extended shot. There’s a bank heist, too, although that’s not the most important part of the film. But still, Victoria had me feeling that every single-shot feature, not that there are too many of those, would benefit from a heist....

Bunker (Jenny Perlin, 2021) Boasting nearly 20 features, this year’s edition of the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival, which opened March 16, is nothing short of a renaissance. Two years ago, First Look was foiled by the pandemic, and last year, the festival worked overtime to program new and old-new titles from the disrupted 2020 season. This year, the festival is undeniably back, with a slate that sparkles with brazen storytelling and seductive selections that are uncannily befitting of this moment....

Mami Wata (C.J. “Fiery” Obasi, 2023) Three critics recommend standouts from this year’s First Look festival, an annual showcase for adventurous new cinema at the Museum of Moving Image in New York City. The 2023 edition wrapped up on March 19. Nigerian filmmaker C.J. “Fiery” Obasi was once told that it was a bad idea to film Black actors in the nighttime, because cameras might not discern dark-skinned figures against dark backgrounds....

The Fantastic Four Last week, the Internet was rocked by shockwaves on a magnitude not seen since Thanos rocked the earth in The Infinity Gauntlet #2. The cast for the forthcoming Fantastic Four movie was revealed! Based on Marvel Comics’s cornerstone franchise, the movie is being billed as a “reboot” of 20th Century Fox’s last Fantastic Four movie, which will be all of 10 years old in 2015, when the new, improved model hits theaters....